Four women among thirty-odd nineteenth-century authors dealing with variance may seem a meager fraction until one recalls that Mary Wollstonecraft was the first of her sex to appear in this record since Sappho. What accounts for this dearth of feminine authorship? Since the renaissance, many women have been published; factual literature attests that female variance has always existed to a greater or less extent; and surely it is a subject in which, if any, one would expect women to show more interest than men. But thus far, only one literary attitude toward variance has enjoyed freedom from censure: disapproval, whether it was conveyed by satire, exhortation, or tragic example.

To such derogatory expression it is natural enough that few women should contribute. Equally obvious are the factors inhibiting feminine expressions of sympathy. For one thing, women have suffered too many critical handicaps on the score of their sex alone to embark lightly upon a venture which lays men of established repute open to attack. More important, a man writing tolerantly of female variance can be accused of nothing worse than tolerance, but a woman is at once suspected of being variant herself, which to the man-in-the-street is tantamount to being lesbian in the most damning sense of the term. This is not mere armchair theorizing. Havelock Ellis in his volume on sexual inversion observes that women poets of his day who had contributed variant histories to his record regularly changed the gender of pronouns in love lyrics destined for publication, in order to conceal the homosexual inspiration of their verses. And the present writer has amusingly enough been viewed askance by certain librarians after demanding from their “restricted” cases novels no more questionable than those of Radclyffe Hall. If this was the state of affairs well into the twentieth century, a time presently to be shown more tolerant of variance perhaps than any since the classical period, how much more stringent must have been the need for caution when to be suspect incurred moral opprobrium and complete social ostracism?

It seems certain, then, that there have been women of variant inclination through the centuries who also possessed literary gifts, and it is probable that exhaustive research would reveal traces of variance in a surprising number of feminine authors from the renaissance on. The purpose of the following chapter is to consider those few whose lives most readily yield suggestive hints, and to correlate such hints with corresponding traces, however carefully masked, in their writing.

Louise Labé. The first promising subject is Louise Labé, lyric poet of the early sixteenth century and one of a group of brilliant young women who brought considerable distinction upon their native city of Lyons. Until the middle of the last century the best biographical encyclopedias stated as fact that in 1542 she took active part in the Dauphin’s siege of Perpignan and acquitted herself so well that she was thereafter nicknamed “le capitaine Loys.”[1] With advances in historical method, the authenticity of this episode has been questioned (though never flatly disproved), the alternate probability being that she took the part of a knight in a tournament celebrating the same victory. In either event, her horsemanship and conduct of arms are described as masterly.

Scholars have expended much effort in attempting to identify the persons to whom her passionate lyrics were addressed. Internal evidence favors the assumption that she had a number of lovers; yet, even the critics who find this idea acceptable have not managed to identify more than one, her fellow poet Olivier de Magny. Several other leading questions also remain unanswered. Why, in view of Labé’s marked poetic gift, does so slim a volume of her verse remain, in comparison to her surviving prose, which is excellent but of lower vitality? And what was the cause of her quarrel with Clémence de Bourges, a younger woman poet to whom she dedicated a volume published in 1555, and, in that dedication, proclaimed as being more gifted and showing brighter promise than herself?

Her biography, like those of many nonpolitical figures so far removed in time, is not rich in documented detail. It is known that she was born about 1520, the daughter of a wealthy cordage merchant. Despite her middle-class status, as a girl she studied music, Greek, Latin and Spanish, and seems also to have known Italian well, especially the work of Ariosto. In 1542—that is, in her twenties, late for those days—she married Ennemond Perrin, another cordage merchant and a friend of her father’s. Her husband was twenty years her senior and the marriage was childless; however, it endured for more than a quarter of a century, and on his death Perrin left her all his property. Both father and husband being men of wealth, Labé had a large house with pleasant gardens which became a rendezvous for poets and artists. Her liaison with de Magny apparently stirred no scandal, but ‘so brilliant a position naturally excited envy,’ and she was rather spitefully nicknamed “La Belle Cordelière.” After her husband’s death in 1565, the noblewoman of Lyons set upon “la petite bourgeoise” for having eclipsed them intellectually and socially, and during the brief year before her own death Labé was accused of being “livrée à toutes sortes de désordres.”[2]

Until the time of her marriage Labé was certainly skilled and active in all the arts of an homme de guerre. Even later (about 1547) when Diane de Poitiers accompanied Henry II on a visit to Lyons, Louise seems to have been one of the moving spirits, if not the organizer, of a fête honoring the favorite, in which young women of the town assumed the costume of Diana the Huntress and exhibited their skill with bow and dart. (It is interesting to find Brantôme alluding to this event in passing, though he mentions no names and no precise date.)[3]

In her thirties Labé rebelled against the limitations of feminine education, proclaiming that women should study all the “sciences” pursued by men, and in the letter of dedication to her friend which prefaced her volume in 1555 she begs them to ‘lift their spirits a little above their bobbins and distaffs.’[4] Shortly after the publication of this work she was estranged from Clémence de Bourges by the aforementioned “éclatante” quarrel of uncertain origin, though until then ‘their union was cited as one rare between two women.’[5]

Apparently no one has suggested that she may have been homosexual. But in her “Elégie I,” we find the following:

If in sixteenth century France the final adjective carried its present meaning, and there seems no evidence to the contrary, this passage is certainly suggestive. In “Elégie III,” a kind of apologia for a life of emotional Sturm und Drang, she says she was only sixteen when she first suffered a devastatingly tragic love, but that she had already loved deeply twice before. She implores her townswomen as they read of her ‘amorous pains, regrets and tears’ not to condemn that “erreur de ma folle jeunesse—Si c’est erreur....”[7] This confession has disturbed some critics profoundly because it seems to imply that she must have been a courtesan.

Only a few of her lyrics reveal the sex of the person to whom they were addressed, an evasion more difficult in an inflected language than in English, and among those which do not betray it is the group that is acclaimed by critics as most distinguished by sincerity, frankness, and ‘an amazing freshness compared to her contemporaries.’[8] The descriptive touches in some of these sonnets, moreover, picture a loved one of more delicate beauty and a passion of less harsh and painful violence than the others. The assumption that she was a lesbian would explain her precocious passions and the number, variety, and anonymity of these later flames better than the hotly disputed courtesan theory, although she was undoubtedly bisexual and very ardent—“tous ses gouts furent des passions,” says one biographer. It would also explain the many, although comparatively unimpassioned, tributes written to her by male poets, for artists incline to be more tolerant of sex variance than the public at large, and they may possibly have gone on record in her favor because she suffered from social persecution.

And finally, lesbianism would account for her estrangement from her younger friend, “of noble family and spotless reputation,” as well as any of the other theories advanced to that end. Until late in the nineteenth century a legend persisted that in the same year that Labé’s volume was published Clémence submitted verses of her own to her friend for criticism, but the latter instead of giving it “enleva a Clémence son amant,”[9] and it was suggested that Clémence’s death within the year was chargeable to this blow. This tale was fairly well discredited in 1877 by the Dutch scholar Boy;[10] however, nothing plausible has replaced it.

Let us consider the case if that rare union was a passionate one. With the older woman married and famous, the younger formally engaged (as Clémence was), their friendship would excite little comment. If the married woman had also had as lover the most distinguished poet of the period, and if, as there is reason to believe, Clémence had married at twenty, and lost a husband, they would be even safer from suspicion. Then Labé publishes the volume of poems described above. She dedicates it to Clémence in a letter lauding the girl’s poetic promise to the skies and deploring a married woman’s humdrum life. If, as commonly happens, identities were inferred at the time for the subjects of Labé’s verses, Clémence’s “noble family,” and her fiancé as well, may have frowned on further intimacy between the girl and the devoted friend who seemed so little in favor of her marrying.

Clémence might still, however, submit her own work for a more practiced writer’s criticism. What happened? Despite the fact that scholars have unhappily been unable to trace de Bourges’ volume, several conjectures are legitimate. Did it contain impassioned verses to the fiancé which stirred Labé to reckless jealousy? Were there cryptic love poems to Labé herself which convinced her that marriage would be unhappy for her beloved protégée? In either case she might have enlightened the young man as to the nature of her relation to Clémence. Unhandsome behavior, but no more so than the legendary stealing of the lover for herself (which Boy believes did not occur). There is a kindlier alternative: she merely warned Clémence that certain poems would be identified as written to her; the less experienced girl, suspecting her of literary jealousy, published them anyway; Labé’s apprehensions proved correct, and the result separated the lovers. But such involved psychology belongs more to the twentieth century than to the sixteenth. All this is conjecture, to be sure, but no more implausible than the several conflicting theories already advanced by Labé scholars. Furthermore, it has the advantage, conclusive with experimental scientists, of providing answers to more questions than any other single hypothesis.

Charlotte Charke. A sadly different life story is recorded in the autobiography written nearly two centuries later by Charlotte Charke, daughter of the erratic actor and playwright, Colley Cibber. (An account of that irresponsible egomaniac’s family life would shed light on his youngest child’s temperament and fate, but cannot be included here.) Though Havelock Ellis expresses uncertainty that Charlotte was actually homosexual,[1] there are elements in her adventures which more than compare with significant passages in the lives of Mary Frith and Catalina Erauso. Like these two women, Charke was a transvestist, and at several points in her story she mentions connections with women which promise definite significance had they been expanded. But at the time of writing she was forty-five, unable to get work, and more than half-starving in a bare single room near a refuse dump in London. Survival depended on her standing well with her readers—her tale appeared in weekly installments—and on her hope of reconciliation with her father, who had long refused aid. Hence her narrative is so full of discreet elision as to be sometimes incoherent or even contradictory. This is particularly evident in regard to her “wearing breeches,” one of the sorest points between her and her family, and also to all her personal relations except her early and unhappy marriage.

Her history is a veritable psychiatric case study. Born when her mother (the actress Jane Shore) was forty-five, she was the youngest of a dozen children and the object of violent jealousy among her elder siblings because of the mother’s favoritism. Charlotte, on her part, was intensely devoted to her mother as long as the latter lived. Precociously brilliant, she was sent to boarding school at eight and within two or three years was crammed with three languages, music, dancing, and geography, all of which she later pronounced useless in aiding a woman to earn her keep. From the age of five she was given to donning boy’s clothes and engaging in the most daring and original exploits, sometimes to the point of grave danger. These make enthralling reading but are not pertinent here. At sixteen she married a worthless bandleader in her father’s theatre—the Drury Lane—and had a daughter within the year; but even before the child’s birth her husband was “running with a plurality of common wretches [women] that were to be had for half a crown,”[2] and at the end of the year the two separated. Her trenchant comment on her marital relations is that both she and her husband “ought rather have been sent to school than to church, in regard to any qualification on either side towards rendering the marriage state comfortable to one another.”[3]

She made her debut as an actress shortly before her marriage and continued on the London stage for perhaps two years after her separation, taking men’s parts at least half the time. Then apparently she went on the boards in her father’s favorite role and one he had made famous, Lord Foppington in The Careless Husband. Perhaps this fact led Cibber to cut off financial support and to spoil her chances with all London producers. More likely it was her travesty of his acting that enraged him, for his vanity was morbid and she inherited his wicked and heartless wit. As long as her mother lived she was sure of some funds, but death soon closed that channel and she was driven to a variety of shifts that would have been tragic had she been capable of taking anything very tragically. These experiences, too, are diverting, but only the most significant can be touched on here. For a time she ran a grocer shop in London, living meanwhile with a young widow who lent her money for her business. Later, when arrested for debt, she was saved by contributions from women, once from a Mrs. Elizabeth Careless whose name suggests her profession, and again from “all the ladies who kept coffee houses in and about Covent Garden ... for the relief of poor Sir Charles, as they were pleased to stile me.”[4] Twice women lost their hearts to her and she was forced to reveal her sex, but her mere word was not sufficient. In the first case we are not told how she managed to be convincing. In the second, she was working as a waiter, and her inamorata came to Charlotte’s room to give her the lie, saying she “could never have made advances to one of her own sect [sic].” When Charlotte asked if she was sure she “understood what she meant,” it led to a physical brawl so violent as to cost Charlotte her position.

Intermittently she acted in the provinces with strolling companies of low calibre and continually bankrupt, and for a long time she and another actress stayed together through thick and thin, the friend caring for her during three years of “nervous fever and lowness of spirits.” At one point she lets slip that this woman passed in a tight place as “Mrs. Brown,” and since “Mr. Brown” was the name Charlotte took whenever she needed an alias, it may be that they lived outside the theatre as man and wife. Finally, they abandoned acting for a time at Chepstow in Wales because Charlotte “met with many friends,” particularly another widow who lent her considerable sums of money, and a younger woman who gave her the use of “a very handsome house with a large garden, near three quarters acre of ground” which had just been inherited. The latter also wrote her “very friendly letters” when she went on short trips. At that time, she attempted to run a bake-shop, still with her faithful friend the actress, who she says now stayed on “only out of sincere friendship and an uncommon easiness of temper,” a suggestion that might well imply a more cogent previous reason. As was said, none of these passages mentions variance, but taken all together and in conjunction with the dark mystery she makes of her first experience in men’s clothes,[5] as well as her family’s relentless disowning of her, they make a picture which seems to justify her inclusion in a conjectural record.

“The Ladies of Llangollen.” Charke’s history brings us to the late eighteenth century, a period when the Age of Reason had passed its peak and the deifying of emotion which characterized the Romantic Period was beginning to appear. Blanche Hardy, in a biography of the Princess de Lamballe, says:

One such passionate friendship was born in Ireland, though the parties to it are universally known as “the Ladies of Llangollen,” the picturesque valley in Wales where they spent the greater part of their lives. The journal kept for forty years by the elder of the two is now all that survives of their writing, though references to them in the work of friends suggest that both wrote some nature essays and verses. The younger was something of an artist as well. Both Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby came of titled families. They met first at a school in Kilkenny, probably when Eleanor was nearing twenty and Sarah entering her teens, for there seems to have been about seven or eight years’ difference in their ages. Their friendship apparently flourished for nearly a decade before Eleanor’s harsh and prudish mother tried to force the boyish young woman into either a distasteful marriage or a convent. Sarah’s mother, a second wife, had died in the girl’s infancy. After a third wife increased the already large family, Sarah lived with a cousin whose husband made advances which were disgusting and gravely disturbing to the adolescent girl. Her older and more independent friend, given to wearing men’s clothes, proposed an “elopement,” but the two were without resources, and after spending several nights in a barn they were apprehended and brought back in disgrace. Sarah at once fell gravely ill. Eleanor was forbidden to see her, and Sarah’s cousin accused Eleanor of having

This cousin also attempted to keep Sarah from receiving Eleanor’s long letters, which she said only aggravated the girl’s illness.

The romantic pair had an ally, however, in a servant, Mary Caryll, known as “Molly the Bruiser” because of her marked masculinity. With this girl’s help, Eleanor was hidden in Sarah’s bedroom closet for several days, whereupon the latter promptly recovered, and as soon as she was well enough the pair staged a rebellion—they simply refused to live any longer at home or apart from one another. Both families being by now worn down, the girls were given a small allowance and invited to remove themselves permanently from the neighborhood. They managed to get as far as Wales, and, once established, they sent back for Molly, who remained their servant until her death many years later.

Though “poor as church mice,” the two women were radiantly happy, and “of a personality so powerful” that they were known as the Platonists. “Their retreat became a kind of court at which all the great ones of their time presented themselves. Wordsworth, DeQuincey, Scott, the Duke of Wellington and Mme. de Genlis were among their guests,”[3] and they had a half century of idyllic happiness before they died, Eleanor in 1829 and Sarah in 1831. The journal which Eleanor Butler kept from 1788 until her death records the placid course of their mutual existence, detailing financial stress lightly borne, small village tensions faced with equanimity, and again and again “a day of sweetly enjoyed retirement.”

On the precise nature of the relation between them the journal is naturally reticent. The modern French analyst of all feminine emotions, Colette, devotes better than twenty pages to it in Ces Plaisirs, and epitomizes neatly the distinguishing feature of all such attachments.

If English readers of Eleanor’s journal want to see in a single mention of “our bed” an impure significance, says Colette, then let them.

Karoline von Günderode. During the same years that saw these willing exiles living out their rapturous idyll, a very different life was swept along on the tide of romantic Sturm und Drang in Germany. Karoline von Günderode was still unborn when the Ladies of Llangollen settled in their Welsh elysium, and suicide ended her quarter-century of life two decades before their death. Outside her native land this distinguished young romantic poet is most likely to be remembered through her brief connection with Bettina Brentano von Arnim, sister of the poet Clemens Brentano and the “child” of Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kind. The mercurial and precocious Bettina was undoubtedly a very remarkable young person, but scholarly research has proved her published correspondence with Goethe to be largely spurious, and even the superficial reader can detect signs of post facto interpolation in her letter to Goethe’s mother describing Günderode’s death and the two girls’ previous relationship.[1]

Equally copious expansion is evident in the correspondence with Günderode,[2] a really remarkable volume of philosophy, poetry, and romantic “sensibility” made human, however, by the small ordinary preoccupations of the two very busy young women. Nine-tenths of the volume is occupied by Bettina’s own letters, supposedly written during a number of brief absences when she was a guest at various country estates. Had these voluminous outpourings actually been penned under such circumstances the girl would have had no time for meals or sleep, let alone the normal social exigencies of house-party life.

Karoline von Günderode was one of several daughters of a moderately affluent widow, who spent the latter part of her short life in a “Kloster” (not a religious house but a dignified retreat for well-born spinsters such as has been charmingly pictured by “Isak Dinesen” in Seven Gothic Tales). She was, by all accounts, an interesting mixture of emotional mysticism and sceptical “masculine” intellect, and both are reflected in her poems.[3] At least one of these, “Wandel und Treue,” suggests that there is no certainty save that all is uncertain, no ultimate Truth because life and universe alike are in constant flux and inexpressible in terms of any constant pattern. It might almost have been written today rather than a century and a half ago.

The context in which the poem is quoted shows that it grew out of long-sustained discussions between her and Bettina on the nature of love. It is cast in the form of a dialogue between Violetta, who embodies Bettina’s championship of romantic constancy, and Narziss, who represents Günderode’s own viewpoint. The latter holds that love, like all else, is subject to change; therefore, one should not attempt to fix it upon a single person or thing, but should love only Love and follow its dictates wherever it leads. The amount of stress laid upon this composition by Bettina, who compiled and inflated the correspondence for publication, suggests an effort to throw upon the other woman all responsibility for any inconstancy which ensued.

The sixty-page biography of Günderode in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste[4] records several variant attachments in her life. Previous to her acquaintance with Bettina she enjoyed a very close friendship with Frau Karoline von Barkhaus, to whom she wrote oftener than weekly in the warmest terms, and in one of the quoted letters she mentions that ‘a room is ready where we will sleep together when you come.’ Another woman, Frau Susanna Maria von Heyden, mentioned as her most intimate friend, fell heir to Günderode’s portrait and two paintings of the scene of the unhappy girl’s death. She ‘never recovered from her grief over her unlucky friend, and lived secluded from the world in joyless solitude.’

As to the relationship with Bettina, their correspondence shows it to have been warmly emotional as well as intellectual. Bettina wrote at length to Madame Goethe of Günderode’s extreme sensitiveness and intensity, describing the latter’s pallor the first time that Bettina kissed her on the mouth, and generally betraying awareness of unpleasant gossip and eagerness to deflect it from herself.[5] The facts of the case seem to be that, like Labé and Clémence de Bourges, the two girls had a serious quarrel, and Günderode’s suicide followed closely enough upon it to create some unpleasantness for the survivor. Here, too, the cause of the quarrel was a man, and editors of Günderode’s poems and letters claim that it was the tragic end of this romance with him which led the poet to take her own life. The man involved had, while fairly young, married a widow thirteen years his senior, who had several children. When he and Günderode found themselves deeply in love, the wife, with “sterbender Güte,” agreed to release him, but under emotional stress the already tubercular young man suffered a serious hemorrhage, and since he was not yet free it was the wife who nursed him back to health. In penitent gratitude he swore that if he lived he would never leave her, and he kept his vow. This version of Günderode’s tragedy is offered by the conventional biographies.[6]

In Bettina’s letters and elsewhere, however, the story survives of the man’s being a fellow guest of hers at one of the house parties which spacious living and difficult travel fostered in the eighteenth century. Full of his love for Günderode, he paid much attention to a child in the house who reminded him of his beloved, and in Bettina’s presence he called the little girl “his Karoline” (her name was Sophie) and caressed and kissed her. The fiery Bettina, furious that he ‘used expressions in speaking of Günderode as if he had a right to her love,’ told him off roundly, and this contretemps apparently led to some difficulty between him and Günderode—the only reasonable explanation being that Bettina must also have talked as if she “had a right to her love.”

The quarrel between the two young women followed, and one summer evening a few weeks later Günderode strolled unobtrusively to the bank of her favorite stream and there shot herself. It is not suggested that any overt scandal occurred, or that the quarrel with Bettina was the immediate cause of this act. Günderode’s poetry is minor-keyed and full of a romantic preoccupation with early death. But certainly something in the relation between the two girls was a contributing factor. And that variant inferences are not far-fetched is evidenced by a German lesbian novel of 1919,[7] in which the memory of Günderode is worshipped with passion by a brilliantly educated lesbian, while Bettina is the object of jealous hatred. The author of this tale (of which more later) is known to have had access to much German material not available to the present writer, which apparently supported the lesbian inference.

* * *

Only a few years after Günderode’s death a tragedy in Edinburgh was directly attributed to homosexual scandal. Two mistresses of a private school, Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie, were accused of tribadism by Dame Helen Cumming Gordon on the evidence of a young relative (or ward) who was a pupil in the school. The young women brought suit for slander and after a long and bitter battle apparently won their case, but their reputations were damaged to the extent of ruining their educational enterprise. It is upon the court record of their trial that Lillian Hellman based her Broadway success of 1934, The Children’s Hour, and their story will receive further attention when that drama is considered under twentieth-century literature.

George Sand. In France the spectacular figure of George Sand invites attention, both because of her adoption of male costume in the 1830s, and because critics are agreed as to the pronounced masculinity of her always semi-autobiographical heroines. She wrote nothing to be classed as variant, but special note is due her Gabriel-Gabrielle,[1] the title an obvious echo of Balzac’s Seraphitus-Seraphita, which antedated it by only five years. Sand’s title-character is definitely an intersexual, but the author avoids variant emotion and concentrates upon psychological ambiguity. Gabriel, an orphan, is not only raised as a boy, but by a somewhat strained device is made to believe that she actually is one until she attains her majority. Learning at this point that the deception has been contrived by her grandfather, to secure for his branch of the family a fortune which can be inherited only through the male line, she sets out to find her defrauded male cousin and make restitution. The two fall in love, marry secretly, and live abroad in the hope of avoiding family interference. Their effort is futile, and after much tragic misunderstanding and dangerous intrigue, Gabrielle is finally set upon and killed by her grandfather’s hirelings during one of the periods when she is again, as during her youth, posing as a man.

The most pertinent passage describes a masked ball which Gabrielle attends dressed for the first time as a woman. The cousin, who still believes her a man, speaks recklessly of how easily he could love “her.” Her reply is:

Later she implores him not to duel with a fellow-reveller who has insulted her, as when it is known that she is “really a man it would be ridiculous. And who knows? Wicked minds could even find in it matter for odious interpretation.” Her cousin replies: “That’s true. May my honor and reputation for courage perish, rather than that flower of innocence which graces your name. I will turn it all off as a jest.”

As it is common knowledge that, though never a compulsive transvestist, George Sand wore men’s clothes as frequently as women’s from her girlhood in Nohant until she approached middle age, her treatment of this incident is rather surprising. But this, and her careful avoidance of so much as the mention of female homosexuality, carry a suggestion of the caution observed by all potentially suspected variants. The circumstances of Aurore Dudevant’s childhood and puberty were enough, in all conscience, to produce any or all of the aberrations in a psychoanalyst’s manual. Her heterosexual affairs were so numerous, open, and dramatic that few students have looked for other emotional incidents in her life. By her own statement, however, she never achieved complete satisfaction with any of the men she loved,[3] and there are a number of suggestive incidents which crop up in one after another of her biographies.

During her last year in a convent school in Paris—at about seventeen, that is—she suffered what in modern parlance would be called a violent “crush” on an Irish schoolmate. In the 1830s she was “for a long time ... fascinated by the great romantic actress of the day, Dorval.... Dumas and Vigny loved her (Dorval), and she had been Musset’s last mistress. George had seen much of her in those years, so much that Vigny had become jealous of their intimacy.”[4] (André Maurois quotes a letter in which Vigny refers to Sand viciously as “that Lesbian.”)[5] Many years later, after Dorval’s death, Sand took over the responsibility for her children. During Sand’s sojourn in Switzerland in the middle 1830s she met Mme. d’Agoult—known to literature as Daniel Stern—and was so strongly attracted that she entertained her new friend at Nohant for several months after their return to France. Subsequently the two lived but a few doors apart in Paris and for some time held a joint salon. Still later she experienced a friendship of similar intensity with Pauline Garcia, Malibran’s sister and a noted singer. Even after Garcia had married Viardot, Sand continued to see so much of her that Mme. Viardot was generally referred to as “Mme. Sand’s friend” first, “the great singer” second.

Given Sand’s passionate temperament and her lack of restraint, it seems reasonable to assume that she had several variant experiences, which were overshadowed in the public eye by her more dramatic heterosexual ones, and about which she preserved discreet silence in her writing. It may be argued that such silence is out of character with her fictional volubility about her other affairs. But the noted men of her day with whom she became involved had little to fear from her advertising their relations with her. For her own reputation she was apparently not much concerned, being a true and courageous child of the period; however, she may well have felt consideration for women whom she loved and who had more to lose. Possibly her variant attachments were not physical liaisons; nevertheless, if she had presented them fictionally in their true intensity, because of her other notorious experiences it is unlikely that they would be credited with innocence.

Emily Brontë. In England an even more complete discretion was guarded by the enigmatic Emily Brontë. All four of the Brontës wrote with talent which in Charlotte and Emily approached genius; yet their lives as children of a poor clergyman in a remote country village were almost empty of outward event. Emily’s was barren even of a love affair, a paradox to critics in view of the emotional power in her writing. In the century since their deaths, some hundred critical and biographical studies have attempted to solve the Brontës’ riddle. In Charlotte’s case the task is relatively simple, since her letters reveal without much reticence two passionate attachments, one to Ellen Nussey, an early school friend, and the second to Constantin Héger, master of the school in Brussels where she twice stayed briefly, as student and as teacher. The first love was of such intensity that E. F. Benson, in his biography of Charlotte, frankly pronounces it homosexual, though he is quick to add that considering the frequency of such experience among adolescents of both sexes, it should be regarded as more normal than otherwise.

It is true that this friendship began in the years between fourteen and sixteen when Charlotte and Ellen were together in boarding school, but it seemed to grow rather than diminish over the subsequent decade, until Charlotte was writing to Ellen in her twenties of “trembling all over with excitement after reading your note.” In 1836, when she was twenty-one, Charlotte wrote:

And again in the next year:

From the very openness of these transports it must be obvious that the relationship was an innocent one, and indeed that she herself was ignorant of any other possibility. Moreover, all the fire went out of it as soon as she had met and fallen in love with M. Héger.

Emily’s case is more complex; consequently, all manner of solutions have been advanced for the puzzle she presents, from a most secretly hidden liaison of the ordinary sort to an incestuous relation with her brother Branwell. The most illuminating suggestions from the viewpoint of the present study are found in Romer Wilson’s All Alone and in Virginia Moore’s The Life and Eager Death of Emily Brontë. Miss Wilson analyzes in Emily what she terms the “Dark Hero ideal,” a male alter ego which she very plausibly claims to be the most significant feature of Emily’s personality, and of which she shows Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights to be a projection. Employing a different approach, Miss Moore assembles objective testimony that from earliest childhood Emily was boyish in appearance, temperament and behavior, and suggests that many of her lyrics were inspired by a person of her own sex.[2] In Emily’s own day, of course, Wuthering Heights was the one novel published by the pseudonymous “Bells” whose feminine authorship critics longest refused to credit, and Moore’s chapter advancing the theory of Emily’s variance is very convincing. Adverse critics have attacked Moore’s soundness on the score of her misreading the title of a poem in the British Museum Brontë manuscript; however, all the Brontë handwriting is virtually illegible, and Moore was the first to study the document. In her zeal to consider all conceivable evidence for a man in Emily’s life, she read as “Louis Parensell” a title shown later to be inserted in Charlotte’s hand and deciphered as “Love’s Farewell,” but at least her exhaustive search for records of Mr. Parensell has reduced the likelihood of any subsequent scholar’s unearthing evidence of a lover.

Surprisingly enough, Moore failed to capitalize on one important episode in Emily’s life—the girl’s reaction at fifteen to her first meeting with Charlotte’s bosom friend, Ellen Nussey. At the time of Ellen’s first house-visit to the Brontë’s she was, on the evidence of a surviving portrait, a bewitchingly pretty and very feminine young woman. Thus the adolescent Emily, who had had opportunity of meeting virtually no one outside her family, was thrown into contact with an older girl of great physical appeal and one patently capable of variant emotion. The house was small, and sleeping arrangements involved Emily’s sharing a bedroom with Charlotte and her guest.

One day Charlotte was ill and unable to entertain her guest.